FTM has provided the perfect environment in which to complete a PhD. The thriving PhD community in FTM has made the past three years not only academically stimulating, but a really enjoyable experience.
Melanie Kennedy, PhD Candidate

Our School has a thriving and active postgraduate community with over 40 students currently working towards their PhD. If you have a research proposal that you would like to discuss, or any questions about postgraduate research in our School, please contact Su Holmes, our Postgraduate Research Director.

All applications for our Postgraduate Degrees are handled by the Faculty of Arts and Humanities Graduate School.

Staff research interests

If you do your PhD in our School, you'll be supervised by one or more members of our internationally renowned research staff. We are active in wide and varied fields of research, from film and television history to gender and post-feminism, national cinema studies (particularly Britain and Japan), and audience and reception studies. The School's research output was described as producing work of ‘international excellence', that is ‘world leading' in the most recent UK government Research Assessment Exercise.

Student research

Our current students are producing equally compelling research, developing work on topics such as the Pixar brand image, online fan communities, fashion in television, Indian animation, the cross-genre appeals of role-playing games, the Chinese reception of Avatar, audiences and film trailers, and American teen pics.

Study days and research skills training

As a postgraduate student, you'll also be part of our regular research programme: you'll see guest lectures on the latest research in the field; you might be involved in organising one of our regular study days or symposia. (Recent events have covered youth media, new approaches to British cinema and television, female celebrity, and Shane Meadows.) You'll take part in our weekly postgraduate training seminars, and you'll have the chance to hone your research skills through sessions organised through the Faculty of Arts and Humanities Graduate School.

PhD by Professional Practice (Creative / Critical)

In the late 1980s UEA pioneered in the UK a new type of creativity PhD, which can blend academic study into a creative discipline or theme, with the actual creation of a work of art or literature. This is now available at the School of Film and TV Studies, in the form of a PhD by Professional Practice. This will provide postgraduate students or those with substantial existing creative experience with the opportunity to study and research at doctorate level film and TV theory and practice within a critical-creative research framework, at one of the first British universities to develop the study of film and television. More information here.